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Bush’s Niece Endorses Plastic Bag Recycling

By Sewell Chan November 5, 2007 1:04 pmNovember 5, 2007 1:04 pm

Lauren Bush promoting her other bag-based campaign, the FEED bag, last month. Sales of the cotton and burlap carryall she designed benefit the United Nations World Food Program. (Photo: Riccardo S. Savi/Getty Images)

Ms. Bush, 23, appeared at the Whole Foods Market in the Lower East Side this morning with the City Council speaker, Christine C. Quinn, who supports the legislation, which was introduced last week by Councilman Peter F. Vallone Jr., a Queens Democrat. At a news conference, Ms. Bush, who graduated from Princeton last year, said her interest in plastic bags began about four years ago, when she learned about their impact on the environment. Ms. Bush told reporters:

The average American uses between 300 and 700 bags a year. To give you a visual of that number, if everyone in the U.S. were to make a giant chain with their plastic bag, it would wrap around the earth 760 times. That’s just the American annual consumption of plastic bags. And on top of that, plastic bags don’t biodegrade. They only break down into tiny toxic little bits that pollute the soil and our waterways. This process is called photodegrade and it takes around 1,000 years for these bags to break down in our landfills. It is for these reasons that I support this legislation in City Council. I think it is important for New Yorkers to recycle plastic bags and buy reusable bags.

Ms. Bush has focused her philanthropic efforts on hunger and the environment; she has been an honorary spokeswoman for the United Nations World Food Program. At today’s news conference, she promoted the FEED Bag, a reusable cloth bag that costs $60 and enables the food program to feed a child for one full school year.

“This program not only encourages nutrition, which they desperate need in these Third World countries, but it also gives them an education, because food is really the incentive that draws these children to school,” she said. She also called the bag a “cool, accessible product.”

Under the City Council bill, stores greater than 5,000 square feet would be required to place “easily accessible” bins for customers to drop off their bags and would also be required to sell cloth or durable, reusable plastic bags. The bill would require that each plastic bag carry a printed message, at least three inches in height and in capital letters: “Please return this bag to a participating store for recycling.”

So far, the industry’s response to the bill has been mixed. John A. Catsimatidis, the supermarket mogul who runs Gristede’s, recently changed his party registration from Democrat to Republican, and is contemplating a run for mayor, said the bill seemed like an unnecessary layer of regulation.

But in a phone interview today, Pat Brodhagen, vice president of the Food Industry Alliance of New York State, the trade association for the state’s grocery chains and supermarkets, said it had not yet taken a formal position on the bill. Members of the alliance will meet this week to discuss the proposal, she said.

In fact, Ms. Brodhagen spoke positively of some aspects of the bill. “If it singles out food stores, we have a problem, but this bill doesn’t do that,” she said. “It applies to anyone over 5,000 square feet who uses plastic bags. It’s important for folks to understand that plastic bags are ubiquitous, and that everyone who uses them needs to be invested in them. Given this new attention to bags and the environment, of all the positions that have been floated, the notion of recycling them is the most intelligent, in our view.” She said a ban on non-biodegradable plastic bags — as San Francisco has enacted — would not work in New York.

“I think the bill’s going to need work, but it’s something we can do and are doing,” Ms. Brodhagen said of the recycling effort, noting that several supermarkets in upstate New York and on Long Island had begun voluntary recycling efforts. “It’s a question of finding a way to do it.”

The Progressive Bag Alliance, a coalition of several plastic bag manufacturers, has thrown its support behind the recycling effort.

Whole Foods Market, which is not a member of the Food Industry Alliance of New York State, sells cloth bags and offers a small discount to any shopper who returns a plastic bag to its stores for reuse. The chain, which is based in Austin, Texas, supports Ms. Quinn’s bill. (Even so, Whole Foods, which bills itself as environmentally responsible, has occasionally had to defend its use of plastic.)

The problem in this country isn’t specifically our plastic bag consumption but the way we purchase food. Getting millions of people (mostly suburbanites and rural Americans) across this country to purchase a $60 reuseable bag is impractical because of the nature of the way in which we shop. A trip to the store isn’t for milk, bread, and sugar anymore. It is an all out expedition in which soccer Moms load up bag after bag into a big gas-guzzling SUV to feed the troops for the next two weeks. If our food culture was more like the British system say, where less preservatives are used and thus forces people to buy in smaller quantities, one or two reusable bags would be more practical for a more frequent trip to the grocer. Unfortunately, that is simply not the situation with food here.

I have a question. Are supermarket bags any less biodegradable than plastic kitchen trash bags? I don’t buy trash bags, instead I use supermarket bags for this purpose and when I have enough bags, I shop with a canvas tote. This way I use the minimum number of plastic bags of any kind.

My question in all of this – is what do people who use cloth bags use to bag their garbage with? Several of my friends who are cloth bag users end up buying virgin plastic garbage bags for their garbage. This seems silly to me. At least the store plastic bag gets recycled once when you use it to store your garbage.

When my parents were growing up in India, trash was non-existent. Everything was re-used and people bought everything fresh since refrigeration was also unheard of. Now the state of countries like India is moving faster than it can support, so let’s set an example here.

for Kate: i have 10 reuseable bags, bought for a dollar each at vitamin cottage that are not oversized like the one lauren is pushing. they work just fine for LOTS of stuff, not just groceries. i recycle with them, take them shopping everywhere. even the bags whole foods sells here are not near $60.

Here is a very simple thought, charge the customer between 10 and 50 cents per plastic bag or offer alternatively reusable cloth bags at a decent price. This method has been used in Germany for years and works very well. The 5 cent credit at Whole Foods has never enticed me to bring my own bags, I do it out of enviromental responsibility. If you calculate 50 cents per bag and an average of 7 bags per grocery shopping trip, people will suddenly remember not wanting to pay $3.50 each time they shop. It is unfortunate, but I think hoping that people will just remember to recycle their bags is not very realistic. 50 cents per plastic bag is most likely cheap, if you don’t only calculate the production cost but also the long term environmental cost. Recycling plastic bags is a good idea but it would be even better to avoid using them in the first place as the best policy to protect our environment is avoiding any kind of garbage recyclable or not.

We usually get our groceries in “paper and plastic” at Shoprite and Foodtown. THe empty bags become neat, liners for our kitchen garbage. I admit to being a little OCD, and frequently vent at family members and friends who don’t follow my garbage can rules. Since I am the one who collects the garbage, and twice weekly puts out the garbage can for collection, I like clean garbage bags. THe garbage guys also treat my garbage can a little better than others on the street, since they can easily lift out the small, tied up bags.

When we have shopped at stores (other than Costco, where we use their corrogated discards to haul away our purchases) that only provide the plastic bags in Wisconsin and Minnisota, where we’ve spent all too much of the past couple of years, they usually bag the groceries themselves, and each bag is mostly empty! We leave the store with many many more bags than needed. Some stores have the “paper or plastic” checkout greeting, nad we usually opt for paper, since they come with handles, but we dasn’t bag ourselves because the store provides baggers who seem offended by customer attempts to bag their own groceries.

It would be a geat benefit to us all to eliminate the little plastic bags, since so many of them go on to after lifes of Feralbag in the trees, bushes, etc. Dry cleaners for many, many years have accepted used hangers and plastic bags, but how many of us recycle them?

Even though paper breaks down in landfills, their production is still detrimental, and even if they are made from recycled products. Most of the time recyclables (cardboard as well as everything else) are sent to China for processing, and then sent back here for consumption. A huge waste of energy in every direction.

Stick a couple plastic bags in your briefcase or backpack or purse, and use them for quick spontaneious trips to the store. Buy larger reusable canvas bags for planned trips to the store. It takes a couple weeks to get the hang of it. I even take my own plastic bags to order take-out (as long as the food is not in plastic either) and sometimes take my food out of their bag and hand it back to them. With a smile of course!

Who is the recycling company that will be responsible for collecting/recycling these bags?
How will they be recycled? Into what?
A few years ago, a big name supermarket chain in
the Northern Dutchess County area had a recycling bin for plastic bags. Frequently, I would inquire
how they are recycled. Store clerks told me they
don’t really get “recycled”, its just a collection
point for the bags and they ultimately get put in
the store’s trash.
I reuse the plastic bags for garbarge, rather than
buy garbage bags. Most of my food purchases go in
a canvas bag ($4.99). I tried to bring the canvas bag into places like CVS or Target or Macy’s to put my puchases, but I risk being followed around the store by their security
personnel. Takes the joy out of shopping.

I use my plastic grocery store shopping bags to line my wastepaper baskets at home also, eliminating the need to buy plastic liners. Pat Brodhagen asserts that a ban on non-biodegradable plastic bags would not work in NY. Why not? It’s working in California. Paper bags are biodegradable, can be recycled and can be used as garbage bags. Paper bags are a simple solution.

I just returned from living in Germany, where you must pay for bags at most stores. They offer “cheapy” plastic bags, more sturdy and reusable plastic bags, a kind of woven paper/plastic combo, and canvas/fabric bags. I enjoyed buying reusable bags from different stores; some of them were actually quite stylish and were only 1 euro each. I think it would be GREAT if American stores would catch on to this idea (though, admittedly, perhaps annoying for both shoppers and store employees, at least at first). Aldi stores in the US charge for bags (they offer paper and plastic of different strengths). I hate plastic bags and have kept up the habit of always having a small canvas bag in my purse when I’m out. If I’m only buying a few things most cashiers don’t seem to mind setting my things aside for me to bag or helping me bag them. If I have many things I just have the cashier put them back in my cart and I try to stand out of the way while bagging. Anyhow, I think if it is presented more as an economic issue (would you want to pay for bags every time you went to the store?) it might be more popular. It would take a good deal of initiative on the part of the stores but they would probably save themselves, by not have to buy so many plastic bags.

Perhaps the NY Times delivery service should take notice. We all appreciate our papers being protected by plastic bags on rainy/snowy days, but why are they bagged in plastic every day (double-bagged when it really does rain)? I recycle the bags when cleaning the litter box but I’ve so many bags I could help the ASPCA & have some left over.
Go green, NY Times!

What happened to “bring your own bag” to the grocery stores? Just stop producing the plastic bags, or start charging for them! That will get people’s minds to shift away from this whole consumption of processed/over packaged food, to a more bulk/reusable bag methodology.

No, thank you. We don’t want him back. Just use him to line the trash can or put kitty litter in or something useful.

I’m of both camps. Once a week, I take my backpack down to the farmer’s market and fill it up with tasty food and the only plastic sack I use is the one I put the frozen meat in to keep the condensation from getting all over stuff.

But there are things I can’t get at the market, staples like rice and flour and cinnamon. For those I go to the grocery store (though CostCo with its recyclable cardboard boxen is an increasingly common choice), and there I get the occasional plastic bag. I then use that bag to line a bathroom trash can, or pick up kitty litter.

It does bother me, though, when I see people at the store taking what must be fifty bags out, knowing that most people just end up throwing the things away.

Another option for non-recyclable garbage. May be tough for NYC apt dwellers but for people who bring a bag out to a pail, why not just fill your inside pail without a bag and then when full dump it in the outside pail. It can then be just dumped in the truck as is… The inconvenience would be cleaning out the pail a few times a week…

Why is this an unlikely source? Simply because her dad’s brother is the President? Does that automatically make her a Republican? And if so, you’re presuming that every Republican is against sustainable living and the environment, which is an absurd, ignorant -but all too common- presumption. I’m not Republican -or a Democrat. But it’s hilarious how the New York Times’ liberal nuances really aren’t subtle at all. Nice negative-filled article on Bloomberg today. Sure, you’ll say Spitzer has a temper but you’ll stop right there. You would never say that he has a “potty mouth” or has said insensitive remarks, which he has. It’s just annoying sitting here from an objective side, reading the Times wallow in it’s ignorant -but hilarious for me- bias.

And now you’re on the Colbert wagon!!? Wait, isn’t he conservative? A different conservative? Or is it that he’s reached a cool factor that the Times can’t afford to get in line behind, like a fraud? Be on your guard though -I’m sure he’s pro-environment… Wouldn’t want you to be blind-sided again like with Ms. Bush.

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